Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue (12 page)

For all their bravado, the young men of the neighbourhood were slower than their mothers to linger and talk to Betsy. Once
they became accustomed to her, however, they were just as happy to stop and chat. Shorter working hours from 1908 meant young colliers had more time to themselves, a chance to kick a can or a football about outside (though, as often as not, their ball was screwed up paper). Some kept ferrets and liked to go ratting – 1d a tail – and describe their successes to Betsy. Slapping their hard-earned pennies on to the counter, they'd tell her about their day. Those buying cigarettes with their first wage handed over the coins with particular pleasure. Arnie Cresswell, Thomas Jobb, Isaac Dance and Joseph Braithwaite, friends since schooldays and now young foundrymen together, liked to share a packet of Wood-bines and sit on the causey edge to divide them: one passed between the four while they sat talking, the remainder tucked behind their ears for safekeeping. Betsy heard them divvying up their spoils and making plans for the following day.

By 1911, my great-grandfather was foreman of the brickyard just below the Wheeldon Mill Plantation, with a motley crew of
ten beneath him, men and boys; Dick, the collar-and-tie man with a watch chain spread across his chest, they, hoisting up their oldest clothes with leather belts or knotted rope. Come Tuesday evenings, a fresh collar was needed, plus braided cuffs and ceremonial apron. My great-grandfather's ‘elevation' to grocer (a silent title if ever there was one) led to him joining the Buffs. For more than forty years, Dick was a member of the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes, being admitted to the organisation shortly after leasing the shop. Tuesday night was Buffs' night. Rain or shine, he picked up the attaché case containing his regalia and walked to his lodge meeting at the Angel Inn.

Sometimes, Annie and Eva accompanied him, on their way to see the latest extravaganza at the picture palace, Whittington Moor's first. It was all a bit makeshift, really – literally, a hole in the corner affair – in the clubroom above the stables for the Queen's Hotel. A bedroom held the projector, with a gap knocked through the wall into ‘the auditorium', its rough and ready nature and flickering screen part of the excitement of the new. Until the cinema's premier status was usurped by the Lyceum, Annie regularly took Eva (she eighteen to my great-aunt's ten), the Nash girls clipping up the steps in their ankle boots, with their chosen sweets for the evening – a handful of mint humbugs, toffees, or whatever else they fancied from the shop. They chatted to the publican's young son, Joe, who liked to assist the projectionist (an early exercise in hand-eye coordination that may have come in useful: Joe Davis was later World Snooker Champion.)

This new-fangled world was all very well, but Betsy much preferred Variety: frock coats, moleskin titfers and all that frothy colour; young girls strutting across the stage, or else picking their way daintily like cats. Some women claimed they only liked the
ballads, but Betsy enjoyed the stronger numbers too: the Marie Lloyd imitators, hand on hip and winking – oh, the sauce they got away with in those songs.

It was a case of either muck or nettles for the corner shop in the years before the First World War: if there wasn't a slump, there was a strike. Everyone in the neighbourhood suffered. Some strikes were more memorable than others, and in the hot sticky summer of 1911, with temperatures soaring higher than at any time during the previous century, one set of workers after another withdrew their labour: dockers, carters, miners; on and on…‘It Is War,' the headline boomed when railwaymen stopped work in August. By the end of the month, the Derbyshire
Courier
had even stronger news to report: the Chesterfield Riot.

The Battle of Chesterfield, a brief but bitter skirmish, started when a Saturday-night crowd surged from the Market Square down to the town's Midland Railway Station and overwhelmed the handful of policemen posted there in the aftermath of the strike. The shriek of police whistles and sound of truncheons cracking heads preceded the arrival of Mayor (and industrialist) Charles Paxton Markham to read the Riot Act to those hurling bottles, bricks and stones. Megaphone authority got him nowhere – Markham was forced to take cover behind a fence – and police reinforcements were helpless before a crowd of some 2,000 (5,000 according to one enthusiastic observer). The whole town was said to be in the grip of the mob. A crescendo of breaking glass all the way up Corporation Street and on to Stephenson Place announced the destruction of plate-glass windows in some of its department stores.

The fight was still raging at midnight, but, shortly after one a.m.,
the
Courier
's reporter spotted ‘glints of steel': fifty men from the Second West Yorkshire Regiment advancing on the crowd with fixed bayonets. The following week, in answer to Keir Hardie's criticism of the Home Secretary positioning troops in strike districts, MP Sir Arthur Markham, who had accompanied his brother the Mayor to the scene, gave a vivid account to the House of Commons of the pandemonium outside the Midland Station.

The Battle of Chesterfield was discussed locally with relish as well as shock – at one point, the town's main Great Central Station was also in possession of the mob: imagine if they'd taken the station at Wheeldon Mill? Strikes were much more than talking points and newspaper headlines, however. No work meant no food beyond the small amounts relief committees could organise. Without their husbands' wages, Betsy's customers could neither buy groceries nor settle their existing debts.

The following year brought another miners' strike – even more working days were lost to industrial unrest during 1912 than in 1911. No coal: no cages lowered down pit shafts; no greedy raging furnaces; nearly everyone in the district was affected. Florrie Stokes, Nora Parks, Mildred Taylor… one after another, women came into the shop and shook their heads in disbelief. Never was a newspaper twist of tea or sugar, or a spoonful of jam more welcome. The Sheepbridge Company established a soup kitchen and issued tickets for groceries that could be repaid once the men were back at work. There was nothing to do but wait.

Some said they knew 1912 would be a bad 'un, given the wicked start to that year: the funerals of five young girls due to perform in a Christmas performance at the town's Picture Palace. Waiting in the nearby cottage that served as a dressing room, one of the young performers threw something on to the fire. A spark leapt
the fire guard and caught her dance dress. In terror and blind panic, she dashed about the room, igniting one gauzy Eskimo after another. Their burns were so bad that one father, hurrying to the cottage upon hearing of the fire, asked his own daughter, ‘Whose little girl are you?'

By 1912, Annie was in her third year of training at the Princess Street Infants' School and had much more to occupy her time than keeping an eye out for the postman. She loved teaching small children, but mere enjoyment was not enough: in order to obtain a good reference at the close of her apprenticeship, she needed to make a good impression on the headmistress, Mabel Doughty. Annie worked alongside Miss Doughty as a classroom assistant and was allowed to take charge of some lessons, with Miss Doughty observing her work: Composition one week, History the next, and so on, all the way through the lengthy syllabus. Each plan and scheme of work had to be submitted to the headmistress, and every faltering command and imprecise instruction dissected and discussed. When Annie looked about the room to take in her pupils' faces, there was Miss Doughty, straight-backed, solemn-faced, an irritant in the corner of her eye. Night after night, Annie was tormented by the thought of her sharp observations and the way she had of saying, ‘I wonder, Miss Nash…' before slicing into some new failure of hers.

There were also exams to revise for. In 1912, Annie passed the Oxford Local, enabling her to work in schools outside the borough. She could now teach Arithmetic, History, English Language and Literature, including Composition, Geography and Needlework. Betsy and Dick were delighted: another gilt frame for the wall.

That summer, my grandma applied for her first post as an elementary school teacher; Miss Doughty was one of her referees. Amazingly, Annie looked set to make a good disciplinarian (‘looked set', mind, Miss Doughty would not go too far in praising her); the manager of Arthur Shentall's grocery business confirmed her
good character and that she came from a respectable home. Miall Spencer, headmaster of Staveley Netherthorpe Grammar School, also testified to her suitability. Annie's destination was a school in Bolsover, a village some three miles east of the corner shop. Her classmate and admirer, George, found a teaching post near Wheeldon Mill. They both needed lodgings; their mothers agreed the two of them should swap homes.

For the next twelve months, it was turn and turn-about. On weekdays, Annie lodged with George's family, and George occupied the attic room above the shop. It was strange to inhabit one another's houses, to be inside his family but not of it, to come to recognise the brand of furniture polish his mother favoured and how she liked her tea, and to get to know his sisters, especially the youngest, who blushed whenever George's name was mentioned in front of Annie. And it was strange to sleep in the room beside his, a peculiar intimacy, even though George himself was never there. Annie enjoyed his admiration and his company
but this was too much like becoming one of the family. It was as if she was there on approval, with no one saying the one thing on everyone's mind; a foretaste of married life, although Annie was still a guest to be entertained and made welcome, not yet a daughter-in-law.

For George, the exchange was just what he wanted, and my great-grandparents loved having him to stay. Eva was fond of George, too, and he of ‘Kiddie', as he called her. He came to love them all. It was the easiest thing to call Betsy and Dick, Mam and Dad, but there was no reciprocal gesture from Annie. His mother may have found this reticence pleasing and entirely appropriate behaviour in a young woman, but there was more to it than that. If George's vocabulary staked a claim for his future, so did Annie's. And things were about to get more complicated. In 1913, Willie came back.

I
F
W
ILLIE WAS FULL OF STORIES BEFORE LEAVING FOR
A
MERICA
, he had plenty to tell on his return. Two years in Pittsburgh: his first weeks working alongside his brother Harry until he found a bakery job; and the highways, the buildings, and the cars – oh, the cars. He'd seen New York and the Statue of Liberty; he could spin a dollar like a true American. The picture Willie painted of himself, sitting on the quayside on the day he arrived, sounded like something out of the films. But, despite his adventures, he was glad to be home and especially pleased to reach dry land. His ship docked in Liverpool a year and a day after the sinking of the
Titantic
.